80s hair bands or 90s grunge bands?

While 70s rock is more my thing, I pick the 80s rock over 90s rock. It was more fun and upbeat. Despite the fact that I graduated in the early 90s and did enjoy some of the grunge era, I didn't like feeling depressed all the time.

I must warn you. I'm very susceptible to flattery.

I agree with the OP COMPLETELY.

Plus the musicianship was a thousand, hell a million times better than any of the crappy emo grunge bands. They were the worst thing to ever happen to rock.

They who give up liberty to
obtain a temporary safety deserve
neither liberty or safety

I think record company executives in the 80s were all high on crack when they decided that putting untalented hacks in spandex and eyeliner might work. It didn't......hair metal sucked!!!! So they decided to do the opposite and out popped Grunge.

[deleted]

80s hair bands for sure. I still listen to all those bands like Motley Crue and Guns N Roses. I hate the grunge music of the 90s. The only band I liked from that era was Soundgarden and some Alice In Chains. I hated Nirvana, pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots and the rest.

Takin' out the trash, trailer park style!!

I grew up in the 80s and 90s but my fave has to be 80s hair bands or 80s arena rock. I was so bummed in the early 90s when the hair metal was off the radio and it was all grunge.

Angela

its like asking "do you like steak or burgers?". i love both, my formative years were '87 to '96 (16 to 25)so i was listening to 80s metal as well as grunge when that came along, saying one is better than the other is idiotic, at best.

i still listen to both now, i have songs from both eras that mean a lot to me but i also understand that music is there to bring entertainment and enjoyment to the listener, it really doesn't matter what that music is and saying one type of music is better or more 'intelligent' than another is awfully snobbish.

i never had time for music snobs, music should be about what resonates with the listener not what other people consider worthy music. the arguments i've seen in this thread are the thing thats stupid, not the music people love.

get over yourselves.

His anus is soaking wet- Walter Bishop - Fringe

I guess if I had to choose between the music of the 80's and the music of the 90's, I would end up choosing the 80's. While, I liked a lot of the pop and rock music of the 90's, I have to pick the 80's music over the 90's, simply because it was a much longer stretch of great music that lasted from the beginning of the 80's until the end of the decade, and even continuing into the early part of the 90's.

Where as, the 90's on the other hand, was kind of split into 2 parts. The first part being the Grunge years of the early 90's that began the decade with a huge creative bang, not seen since the Rock n' Roll of the mid-50's, and the British Invasion of the early-late 60's. The early 90's also included the wildly successful metal band 'Guns & Roses', which could be argued, was the greatest 80's hair band that had most of its success in the 90's.

However, that great creative period in the pop culture music industry only lasted roughly around 4-5 years, from about 1988-1992, which was followed by a lot of pure garbage from 1993-1995, before the 90's got a small pop-music resurgent by the mid 90's, that lasted until the end of the decade before eventually being usurped by a lot of soulless commercially successful pop-music by the late 90's to the early millennia.(and, here's my argument to make my point about the 90's)

Remember, when ever someone is talking about the great Grunge music of the 90's, it's really a reference to only a few bands that became popular in the early 90's, like Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Temple of the Dog, Alice in Chains and of course Nirvana.

And, of that small group, Nirvana was really the only band to have a lot of mainstream success who contributed the most in terms of advancing Grunges popularity. The rest of the early Grunge bands had a few good singles off their albums but, never really connected with a majority of people outside the Seattle, Washington area like Nirvana did. And, Nirvana's huge success was mainly due from just one album, "Nevermind" that was released in 1991.

After the explosive sudden popularity of the original Grunge sound of the late 80's and early 90's began its slow decent in 92-93 after the death of Kurt Cobain, Heavy Metal also lost its last great champion when 'Guns and Roses' disbanded around the same time as well.

What emerged after a few years of the music industry desperately trying to find another unique sound, that "Special Band or Artist" that would once again define the decade. But, ended up producing a lot of really bad music, and promoting a lot of marginally talented musicians for the next 2-3 years instead.

However, out of that industry driven music monstrosity eventually came the sudden and surprising success of artists like Hootie & the Blowfish, Sheryl Crow, The Cranberries, TLC, Melissa Etheridge, Alanis Morissette and Jewel, starting in late 94' and early 95', who embodied a more traditional form of pop-music that had enormous cross over potential for both Baby Boomers and Generation X'ers alike.

While bands like, The Goo Goo Dolls, Collective Soul, Smashing Pumpkins, Greenday and Oasis contributed to the alternative music scene during this same time period. All of which reminded people young and old what halfway descent creatively popular music sounded like again.

Then toss in the post Grunge sound from bands like Bush, Foo Fighters, Candlebox and Stone Temple Pilots that were heavily inspired by the early Seattle Grunge Scene using the sounds and aesthetic of grunge, but with a more commercially acceptable tone, for better or worse. All of which rescued the decade of the 90's from a legacy of being mostly a decade of absolutely horrible Rock and pop-music.

Unfortunately, the much improved popular music scene of the mid-later 90's was eventually replaced with the commercially successful soulless crap by the late 90's to early millennium with the music of, The Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, 98 Degrees, Britney Spears, Ricky Martin, 'N Sync, ect...ect... which once again cast a dark shadow over the 90's in terms of its musical legacy.

I believe that there's a few really important thing that the 90's gave us, however, Great Music isn't one of them. Rather it's probably more in the area of cinema and technology, like advances in home computers, software, but most importantly "The Internet" that the 90's can take a great deal of credit for.

Especially, in the technological development that gave us the ability to have down loadable music so we can have the music that we want to listen to, when we want to listen to it, instead of having the creatively bankrupt music industry force feed everyone a bunch of CRAP. That's what I would mostly praise the 90's for.